To continue yesterday’s discussion of technological luddites, today we will talk about Wifi allergies. People are allergic to WiFi, or so they claim. They say that exposure to electromagnetic fields is making them sick, and many of them literally resort to wearing tin foil hats. There are many cases on the Internet of people who claim to be sensitive to electromagnetic fields.
- There is this guy, who sued his neighbor for not shutting down his WiFi in 2010.
- Or the parents who sued their child’s school for having WiFi that was making him ill in 2017
- The teen who committed suicide because of WiFi sensitivity
- The woman who lives in a home lined with tin foil
- Some say that they are allergic to cell phone towers
They are full of crap. Let me explain why. When I was in the Navy, one of my jobs was to minimize the ship’s magnetic field in order to avoid magnetically triggered mines and torpedoes. We did this with a system of magnetic coils and a computer that analyzed the ship’s location on the planet, and ran electricity through coils that opposed the natural magnetic field of the ship as it passed through the earth’s magnetic field.
Magnetic fields are subject to the inverse square law. The farther away you are from the object generating a magnetic field, the weaker that field. One unit of measure for magnetic fields generated by electrical currents is microwatts per cubic centimeter, and the safe level is determined by the frequency of the field being generated. Safe limits for EMF in the frequency band that WiFi operates in is about 1,000 microwatts per square centimeter. The safe level of EMF at the frequency of household current (60 hz) is 100,000 microwatts per cubic centimeter.
A WiFi router has a field density of about 50.5 uW/cm^2 at the device, but that quickly drops with distance. Six feet away, that field has dropped by 99.6% to only 0.2 uW/cm^2.
Refer back to the woman who claimed that her husband’s smartwatch was making her ill. At three feet, a smartwatch is putting out a field of 0.11 uW/cm^2. Then there are the people who are allergic to cell phone towers. When I am 1,000 feet from my closest tower, I measure that field at 0.001 uW/cm^2. In other words, nearly nothing. But good enough for 5 bars!
Every one of the people who claim to be allergic to EMF are self diagnosed. Multiple studies of this phenomenon have been performed, and in each case they react when told that the WiFi is on, but don’t react when it is turned on without their knowledge. In short, it’s a mental health issue and not a real problem.
Similar to what we are seeing with transgenderism. People are just dealing with mental health issues, and the Internet is giving them a voice.
15 Comments
Tuning Fork · June 17, 2023 at 7:39 am
Measure 5G and smart meters outside your window, you don’t want them there.
Remember the 5G death ray human zappers going up during the COV-LARP theories?
Read about the Amazon smart home that shut down because the owner was thought to have said something…wayciss. (gasp!)
I always ask Alexa why she is a commie rat POS when no one is looking.
Burning it all down is always a feature and not a bug, the former USA is never coming back.
Demographics is destiny.
Divemedic · June 17, 2023 at 8:48 am
Re: 5G- not how that works. Still can’t exceed the FCC limit of 300 mW/cm2 smart meters are even less
Amazon didn’t shut down his smart house. They shut down his Alexa. I did a post on that.
Jonathan · June 17, 2023 at 9:06 am
Have you ever heard of National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia?
Many people who claim to be affected by radio waves move there.
Divemedic · June 17, 2023 at 12:37 pm
Yes. It’s there because of a radio telescope. There was another near Arecibo, PR. It doesn’t make the people who move there for that reason any less mental.
SiG · June 17, 2023 at 10:49 am
One of my favorite topics. It’s “feces del toro” all the way down.
Every government and every professional organization that has anything to do with radio frequency (RF) emissions has studied the effects of RF on people and nobody has found anything convincing except at the high levels that are regulated. To believe that they found dangers of radio waves and don’t want to regulate them more than they do is to say they don’t want more power. That’s to trust the EPA and the whole fed.gov far more than I do.
35 years ago, I worked with a software engineer and ham, and due to the lab layouts he had to walk through the hardware lab to go outside to smoke. I noticed when I was working on one piece of test equipment he would walk as far as humanly possible from where I was. This box would put out 1 milliwatt – but that’s into a perfect 50 ohm load. When it got to the connector and nothing was there, 99.99% of that would be reflected back into the instrument. It couldn’t possibly radiate 1 mW without an antenna attached to it, which we never did because we didn’t make them. And yet he’d avoid that to go for a smoke break. A totally backwards idea of risk.
Divemedic · June 17, 2023 at 12:39 pm
People fear things that they do not understand. That’s why there is so much pushback on things like 5G, WiFi, and nuclear radiation. There was a time that Americans thought that electricity was a tool of Satan, and that getting your picture taken was stealing your soul.
It's just Boris · June 17, 2023 at 5:51 pm
MW, mW, eh, same thing. 🙂
exile1981 · June 17, 2023 at 11:42 am
There was a study in the 90’s on the effects of high voltage lines and IQ rates of children. It made big news when it came out… except the method stunk. They compared neighbourhoods built around high voltage transit corridors to ones without. Generally the areas around the wires were high density inner city apartment buildings and the ones they compared it too were subburban single family homes.
They didnt compensate for income, race, parents education or even density of people. So its likely those were factors.
In electronics, we have a rule no internet connected devices in the bedrooms. So many of them can be used to spy on you by unsavoury people.
Divemedic · June 17, 2023 at 6:09 pm
I agree. There are no connected devices in the bedrooms or bathrooms. I also cover computer cameras when I am not using them.
Anonymous · June 17, 2023 at 4:33 pm
I’ve already made my mind up — don’t bother me with the facts!
Steve · June 19, 2023 at 5:48 am
Here is a image expressing both sides of the debate; but as I’m a computer engineer, I fall on the IT side. I’m not quite a Luddite, but I don’t allow 3rd party mega-corps inside my home, to control it. I’ve read too many examples of where the homeowner lost over the years, because the 3rd party mega corp decided to disable the home, or parts of it.
Brutus · June 20, 2023 at 10:15 pm
You’re assuming that biological harm comes from burns due to intense energy flux or damage from ionization. However, there is some evidence that some kinds cells regulate biological processes using fairly minute oscillation in the magnetic field (mostly VLF). Are most claims of EMF sensitivity BS? Probably. Do I think there are health impacts from polluting the electromagnetic spectrum? I think it’s plausible.
Divemedic · June 21, 2023 at 4:43 am
To date, there is no evidence of which I am aware. Can you provide links or names to the studies that you reference?
Brutus · June 21, 2023 at 5:08 pm
Originally, I had read about those experiments in Cross-Currents by Robert O. Becker, MD. I don’t have access to that book atm, but was able to find these citations elsewhere.
E. M. Goodman, B. Greenebaum, Michael T. Marron; Effects of Extremely Low Frequency Electromagnetic Fields on Physarum polycephalum. Radiat Res 1 June 1976; 66 (3): 531–540. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3574457
Bernard Greenberg and others, Response of Honey Bees, Apis mellifera L., to High-Voltage Transmission Lines , Environmental Entomology, Volume 10, Issue 5, 1 October 1981, Pages 600–610, https://doi.org/10.1093/ee/10.5.600
Divemedic · June 21, 2023 at 5:20 pm
While interesting, it isn’t new that organisms respond to magnetic fields. Sharks, for example.
However, I remain unconvinced on the negative effects or claims of “WiFi allergies”
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